The night was full of the fragrance of flowers and the foreign trees. There was no breath of wind. They were shades in some garden of dream compelled to stand and ponder for ever in an eternal night of numerous beneficent stars. No sound manifested except the lady’s breathing, that to another than the dreamer would have told an old and wholesome Panic story, for her bosom heaved, that breath was sweeter than the flowers. And the dryads, no whit older as they swung among the trees, still all childless, must have laughed at this revelation of an age of dream. Than that sound of maiden interest, and the far-off murmur of the streams that fell seaward from the woody hills, there was at first no other rumour to the ear. “Listen,” said Gilian again, and he turned an anxious ear towards that grey grassy sea. His hand grasped possessingly the lady’s arm. “Faith, and you are _not_ blate,” said she whimsically, but indifferent to remove herself from a grasp so innocent. She listened. The far bounds of the lawn were lost in gloom, in its midst stood up vague in the dusk a great druidic stone. And at last she could distinguish faintly, far-away, as by some new sense, a murmur of the twilight universe, the never-ending moan of this travailing nature. A moment, then her senses lost it, and Gilian yet stood in his rapt attention. She withdrew her arm gently. “Hush, hush!” he said. “Do you not fancy you hear a discourse?” “I do?” she answered a little impatiently, but not without a kindly sense of laughter as at a child “Bees and midges, late things like ourselves. You are not going to tell me they are your fairies.” “They are, of course they are,” he protested, laughing. “At least a second ago I could have sworn they were the same that gave me my dread on the night the Cornal met us. Even yet”--his humour came back--“even yet I fear to interrupt their convocations. Let us go round by the other path.” “What, and waste ten minutes more!” she cried “Follow me, follow me!” And she sped swiftly over the trim grass, bruising the odours of the night below her dainty feet He followed, chagrined, ashamed of himself, very much awake and practical, realising how stupid if not idiotic all his conversation must seem to her. Where was the mutual exchange of sentiments on books, poetry, life? He had thrown away his opportunity. He overtook her in a few steps, and tore the leaves from his story book again to please or to deceive the Philistine. “I thought we could bring it all back again--that was the object of my rhapsody, and you seem to have kept good memory of the past.” They were under the lamps of the lodge gates. She eyed him shrewdly. “And you do not believe these things yourself? So? I have my own notions about that. Do you know I begin to think you must be a poet. Have you ever written anything?”